Mark Russell

A Supreme Court jury in the murder trial of Angela Williams, who killed her de facto husband with a pick axe and buried him in the backyard, has asked a family violence expert if it is common for a woman who has killed a violent partner to try to get away with it.

University of Canberra Professor Patricia Easteal, in answer to the jury's question, said she knew of two out of about 30 cases in which the body had been buried after a violent partner had been killed.

Professor Easteal, who was called as a defence witness after being given access to witness statements and Ms Williams' police record of interview, said it did not seem "an abhorrent act" to kill a violent partner, bury them and then try to cover the crime up.

"It seems rather normal to me that it could be covered up," she said.

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Ms Williams, 45, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Doug Kally, 48, formerly known as Dragan Dordevic, her partner of 23 years and the father of her two children, in July 2008.

She admits killing Mr Kally by hitting him 16 times with a pick axe and burying his body in the backyard of their home at Indented Head on the Bellarine Peninsula but claimed she had been acting in self-defence after suffering years of abuse.

Ms Williams, who told family and friends Mr Kally had left her and moved to his favourite fishing spot at Kiama in NSW, began a relationship with his best friend David Grainger soon after she killed Mr Kally.

Mr Kally's body was found in a shallow grave wrapped in a tarpaulin more than four years later.

Professor Easteal told the jury the dynamics of family violence were "extremely complex and frequently not understood by those who have not neither experienced it nor lived in it".

"Even those that live in it don't understand it until perhaps they're out of the situation ... So I would say [it involves] a very complex pattern of behaviours, far more than one episode, one physical assault," she said.

"In the cases where a victim of violence kills her violent partner is a kind of violence that is labelled by others, sociologists in the United States, as 'intimate terrorism', otherwise known as 'coercive control'.

"The core of that pattern of violence is about control. It is about the perpetrator's needs to disempower in a huge variety of ways his victim."

Professor Easteal said it was a process of disempowerment and degradation resulting in control.

Many people did not understand how others in a family violence situation were living in "a state of sustained terror".

Asked if victims generally killed their violent partners with just one blow, she said a family violence victim in the home was similar to a woman taken hostage in the jungle and repeatedly sexually and physically abused.

Professor Easteal said if the jungle hostage stabbed her captor 50 times, no one would think it was excessive force because she was saving herself and making her situation go away.

Ms Williams told police she killed Mr Kally after they had argued in their bedroom in July 2008 when he called her a "slut" and accused her of sleeping with Mr Grainger.

The couple had been pushing and shoving each other when she grabbed the pick axe from behind the bedroom door and Mr Kally told her, "Go on, do it you f---ing fat slut."